Do you ever feel like a plastic bag?
Drifting through the wind… wanting to start again?
Yes, yes those are Katy Perry lyrics… and before you think you’ve opened the wrong email or that you somehow clicked the wrong link I want you to seriously consider this idea.
Do you ever feel like you’re just kind of floating around? Like you’ve lost your footing and rather than falling you somehow managed to drift away?
That’s how I was feeling on Sunday.
I felt disconnected and like I was floating around aimlessly.
Later in the day, when we were worshiping together in our Sunday Celebration, the Lord put a passage from Ephesians 3 on my heart for us. He brought it up again for us in intercession and I didn’t begin to realize the significance until the next day! See if you can catch it…
For this reason I kneel before the Father, from whom every family in heaven and on earth derives its name. I pray that out of his glorious riches he may strengthen you with power through his Spirit in your inner being, so that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith. And I pray that you, being rooted and established in love, may have power, together with all the Lord’s holy people, to grasp how wide and long and high and deep is the love of Christ, and to know this love that surpasses knowledge—that you may be filled to the measure of all the fullness of God.
Ephesians 3:14-19 (NIV)
“Rooted and established in love”. Another translation says “rooted and grounded in love”.
That was exactly what I was needing on Sunday… and many other days when the lyrics to Katy Perry’s Firework totally resonate.
I’m sure that there were plenty of reasons the Apostle Paul wrote these words to the Ephesians, and I’m so glad he did and that we get to find encouragement in this letter as well!
And so in the same way Paul told the Ephesians about his prayers for them… I’m hoping that you too can be encouraged and uplifted today. I pray that we may all be strengthened through the power of God’s Spirit in our inner beings, remembering that Christ dwells in our hearts through faith.
More than anything, especially for those of you feeling like purposeless plastic bags, I pray that you may remember that you are rooted and grounded and established in Love.
You are not worthless or aimless; you are valuable and known.
And I pray that we may all begin to understand more of how deep and long; wide and high this miraculously MASSIVE Love of God truly is for us and for our neighbours.
Now to him who is able to do immeasurably more than all we ask or imagine,
according to his power that is at work within us,
to him be glory in the church and in Christ Jesus
throughout all generations,
for ever and ever!
Amen.